How often am I told that I should stop quarreling on Twitter so much because it’s annoying? Almost every day, often by nice, reasonable readers, which maybe should tell me something.

How likely is it that I’m going to stop actually quarreling on Twitter when the mood strikes me? Extremely unlikely, unless the flow of angry messages and comments halts entirely… so yeah, basically impossible.

First, let me say that I understand that many people do not wish to read the back-and-forth and many more will think this entire item is senseless and overly self-involved–and yes, it is.

But I get so many people telling me how annoying I am, and I do try to answer those comments, too… and I also get so much feedback from readers who are relatively interested in why I do this… and even some wry comments from team executives and players about the Twitter wildfires…

That I figured, what the hell, why not give some sort of explanation for something that annoys so many people and yet I decline to stop doing.

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* Point No. 1: This isn’t a “Twitter strategy,” folks, it’s just who I am. When fired upon in a particularly ferocious way, I almost always fire back.

If squabbling many times a week drives away readers, I can live with that. You don’t have to read it, and if you don’t like it, I always suggest NOT reading it or me.

If the back-and forth draws in some readers, that’s OK, too, but it’s not part of any plan and I have no idea how the like/not-like analytics divvy up for my follower-count.
Doesn’t matter to me. I’ve never begged or schemed for readers or Twitter followers; they either read or they don’t, and if what I do naturally isn’t palatable to you, your neighbor or maybe a million neighbors, I’ve long ago accepted all those possibilities.

You read it or you don’t. That maybe makes some people at my own paper quail. I get that.

Not many journalists have any desire or inclination to do it this way, and they’re probably right. The best people I read don’t do it like this. All true. But not everybody does it the same way and not everybody should do it the same way and I’ll allow myself the opportunity to do it the wrong way.

* Point No. 2: I think the harshest anger is usually generated when you hit the most interesting rhetorical landmines, and I think that helps paint the larger picture, if you do it within reason and with relatively sound background information.

I never come up with topics just to stir up anger; I just come up with what I come up with, I talk to a lot of people, I believe in what I believe in, I write what I believe, and sometimes it’s right in tune with 99% of the fan base and sometimes it’s not.

What I never do: Tailor what I write to try to make sure 99% of a team’s fan base feels good about itself. That’s a waste of time and energy, in my opinion. They’ve got the team web pages and many shills for that.

* Point 3: Some of this probably started when I covered boxing for the LA Times in the 1990s, a beat that I was in no way prepared for but actually fit my journalistic personality so perfectly and so wholly prepared me (mentally) to be a columnist some day it was scary.

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Basically, nothing good comes from a timid boxing writer. Doesn’t matter who or where you are, in that sport, the accusations, lies and fists fly and there’s corruption everywhere and the only way to write it coherently is to put yourself into the middle of it at some point.

You’re not supposed to pick sides as a regular reporter, but in boxing you have to weigh the relative merits of the claims and counter-claims and render some version of a verdict just about every day, or else you’re just going to get lost… and your readers will be even more lost or they’ll just stop reading you.

The funny thing (to me) is that I had no real feuds while on the boxing beat… well, until I wrote a book about Oscar De La Hoya that his then-handlers despised (and they were quickly fired) and Oscar himself didn’t quite embrace.

But after covering boxing (and, I must admit, before I covered boxing, too), I had several one-on-one feuds that would’ve gone down horrifically entertaining if they had occurred in the Twitter Era…

-Things were not very chummy between me and Steve Lavin in the middle of his UCLA career.

-I seem to recall some hostilities with the Raiders once I started writing about their poor personnel and financial moves for years after the 2002 season.

-Nothing got Warriors fans angrier at me than when I started writing that Monta Ellis was unhappy with the team, that he wanted to be traded and that, once Stephen Curry was drafted, Ellis should be traded.

-Next-closest thing: When I wrote that the Chris Webber signing in 2008 was a joke and documented that joke-signing for all of its short-life.

-Oh, there was that Robert Rowell/Chris Cohan thing that nobody yells at me about any more, but man, back when they were running the Warriors…

-The David Lee Issue is still on-going.

-There were some heated moments writing about Mike Nolan and Mike Singletary and now when I write about Jim Harbaugh’s manic adventures. Yes, the 49ers are a coach-centric franchise.

-I definitely got many Sharks fans mad at me when I’ve been tough on Patrick Marleau. On this one I admit some back-pedaling over the years; I get why the Sharks defended and kept him all these years and it’s paying off because he’s still good (or better?) now when I predicted he’d be an after-thought; and I have yielded entirely on some early thought that Joe Thornton was an issue, too

I’m sure there are other nuclear topics, but I just can’t think of any of them right now. Wrong or right, I don’t just throw stuff out there. And if attacked on it, I will defend the point.

* Point 4: I’m a columnist. I’m supposed to have ideas that aren’t always the same as everybody else’s thinking. I also believe I should be able to defend my edgier thoughts, and I believe I have that capability.

The three things that I push back most on are…

A) Team shills who whip up the fan base into believing things for the singular benefit of ownership or management. If I fire back repeatedly on a specific topic, it’s often because I suspect the fan-fury is largely being generated by team shills trying to re-direct the argument;

(It has happened before. See: Rowell/Cohan.)

You can always spot the truest shills by their flip-flopping on certain points as time goes by to suit new developments and the changing agendas of management about those new developments;

B) The portions of a fan base that have no comprehension of a larger picture and gather together just to shout down anybody with a viewpoint that makes their team look less than dynasty-bound;
C) Those in management, the shills or in the fan base who try to seize on skewed versions of the truth to try to push some sort of accepted “consensus opinion” that is less than actually accurate.
That’s how I feel, that’s why I react when I’m pushed–I push back.

I don’t hide, I don’t pretend there isn’t anger, I don’t allow anybody to tell me what I can or can’t say at any particular time.

In fact, if I believe something that has hit a lunatic-fringe trigger point, I will usually race to make that point again and again, because that’s the stuff that is the liveliest and probably is worthwhile to be said the clearest.
Even if it’s annoying.

* Point 5: Just a quick potentially illustrative tale from Super Bowl XXVII at the Rose Bowl, my first year at the LA Times (but not my first Super Bowl)…

There were swarms of LAT writers covering this because it was our home game, and in such a huge blow out (Dallas over Buffalo, the Leon Lett game), the topics weren’t easy to spindle out as we raced downstairs to the interview areas in the final minutes.

In that mad rush, as a bunch of us were walking down the ramps, a more experienced writer rushed up to me and said, in a semi-serious tone, that the bosses wanted us both to write the same topic (for historical accuracy, it was Emmitt Smith), and the better story would run and the worse one would be hell-outta-luck.

Was I OK with that?

Whether he was joking about such an odd competitive situation or not (he was joking), I was fine with that. I just was.

My immediate response has become an inside joke with my friends and an unintended but wholly lived credo of mine: “Bring it on.”

Again, this is not the way you’re taught to do it and it’s probably not the right way to go through a career in journalism, but it’s how I
think, it’s how I write, and it’s how I respond when challenged.

I suspect it’s partly why I understand a certain coach at 49ers HQ the last few years; or at least why I think I understand him.

And I won’t be changing any time soon. My apologies if you were hoping I would.

Did you really just post this crap? What a waste of a read. Ugh. Twitter rant… Come on TK. I don’t wanna hear or read about your twitter fights. Please don’t waste space here. I don’t care if you ruffle feathers and I don’t care if yours get ruffled. I like reading about the local teams even when I don’t agree with your viewpoint. But posts like these need to be left on YOUR laptop. Thx

htwaits

I read it all, it didn’t make me mad, therefore I liked it. Not that there were any surprises. I’ve really enjoyed your thoughts about the York, Harbaugh, Baalke relationship.

Letsgetfree

Did you ever know that you’re my hero,
and everything I would like to be?
I can fly higher than an eagle,
’cause you are the wind beneath my wings.

willow

Ageed, Dirk.
Thankfullly, I don’t follow twitter so I’ve no idea about or interest in TK’s behavior on that forum.
Not sure why I read the article, actually.

Richard Dwyer

You have integrity so there is no reason you should change! Do I always agree? Of course not but you can’t be right all of the time!!

Grant Jones

Tim, a very wise person said this to me 35 years ago, and it’s rang true ever since: put the art (in this case, your articles) out there, and let it speak for itself. If you’ve put the effort in, then the work shouldn’t need explaining.

Your pieces are generally quite good, at least in my eyes. And you can’t please everyone, no matter how much energy you put into it. Some people just want to disagree…or to be discontented.

Roger

Tim Kawakami is by far the best sports columnist in the Bay Area. You can
always count on him to say what he really thinks, right or wrong. Thank you Tim.

Jamie

You clearly enjoy being a heretic, which is not a bad thing. Crazy fans get upset when they hear anything critical about their teams, but more sophisticated fans actually enjoy it. As an example, for many years, as a die-hard Warriors fan, they have been abjectly terrible, and have done little to interest me, other than to ruminate as to why they were so terrible. Your writing, breaking down the reasons for this, was for me, the most interesting Warriors coverage I could find. “The team sucks, but I still pay attention. Why does it suck so badly?” Smart fans are interested in the bad, as well as the good, I feel.

So go ahead, critique local teams, critique their management and ownership, and critique their uncritical fans. It makes for useful analysis. But I wonder if there’s one sector of sports discourse that you’re unwilling to critique–namely, senior local sports journalists.

You frequently praise the Santa Rosa Press Democrat’s Lowell Cohn. Not inconsistent with the bulk of his work, Cohn just published a god-awful column on Colin Kaepernick and his negotiations with the 49ers regarding a contract extension. The column employed ridiculously dumb rhetoric (“Someone should slap a Boston cream pie in Kaepernick’s smug face”), specious reasoning, and border-line race-baiting, in making its argument. It has already been roundly mocked in national media circles as paradigmatic of the kinds of STRONG TAKES that characterize sports writing at its worst.

Will you critique something like this at all? Or is this a Rubicon that cannot be crossed? Is Cohn too senior, and all of you Bay Area columnists have to keep it within the family? I’m curious. Because for fans like me, we enjoy your work because it’s much more critical and nuanced than this crap that Cohn slops out. But is the latter above reproach?

victor soma

I like to read Talking points and follow the twitter garbage. It’s all in good fun, it’s just sports after all.

Bigmouth

How very meta… lol.

SurfCity

“I never come up with topics just to stir up anger”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ah!

Good one Tim.

SurfCity

Agreed. Make your point as a writer and then let readers agree or disagree. The need by a writer to shout down every fan that doesn’t like or agree with a column or blog post is juvenile, and show insecurity.

SurfCity

Agreed 100 percent. This column is juvenile.

PeteyBrian

Thanks Timmy! I usually agree with your takes on things and am always entertained… The only issue I remember getting me ticked off was when Linsanity was occurring in NY and you were projecting an Earl Watson-like career… How do you possibly know? Lol! Nonetheless = your take is more accurate now that Beverly has passed him on the depth chart. I’m hoping Lin gets dumped onto a D’Antoni team – or the Phoenix Suns! Lol!

earl monroe

I don’t have to agree with you about everything you write about, I find it interesting that’s why I read it.